Hi All,
I use and love Reddit. I think that it provides most of the useful, thoughtful information on the web, and it’s growing its revenue by about 61.5%. The only thing that is holding me back from jumping in is its legal woes. In particular, two issues MIGHT impact the company. First is the child privacy data handling in the UK, which could cause significant changes to the platform and regulatory penalties. Second, and more importantly, are the lawsuits around data scraping by AI. If RDDT is unable to control their data, then the value of the data will go down.
I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t have a great lens to view these concerns, just food for thought.
The UK makes up about 7% of users from what I could gather. The company is already experienced dealing with GDPR and other country specific regulations. It seems like the UK regulations are similar to GDPR, and I can’t think of a reason that Reddit wouldn’t be able to adapt, or pay a penalty if that case came to fruition
With lawsuits around scraping of data, any lawsuit could only benefit Reddit as they are the one the data is being scraped from. It’s true that almost all AIs have been trained on the corpus of Reddit data pre-2021. However, the platform has gotten more locked down and this is why big players in the space such as OpenAI and Google are now paying for Reddit’s data. The human generated content that gets generated each day has value, while the older data’s value is decaying. For an AI to want to provide up to date results from Reddit they will have to play by Reddit’s rules. There may be some smaller shops that try and illegally scrape data, but companies like OpenAI or Google aren’t going to take those risks.
Reddit was in the news today because they released a product called Reddit Community Intelligence which includes,
Reddit Insights (Alpha): A scalable, AI-powered social listening tool designed to unlock strategic value from Reddit’s 20 years of conversations. Informed by proprietary metadata, it provides precise, real-time insights that help marketers confidently plan campaigns, validate creative ideas, and make smarter business decisions.
Conversation Summary Add-ons (Alpha): A new ad feature that dynamically integrates positive content from Reddit users directly below an advertiser’s creative, putting community conversations front-and-center in the user experience and blending AI-driven efficiency with real human perspectives.